NIRVANA- A Short Story

NIRVANA

In Buddhism is a transcendent state in which there is no suffering, desire, nor any sense of self. The subject is released from the effects of karma and the cycle of death and rebirth. It represents the final goal of Buddhism.

1) What was happening?

It was just another Monday; I was travelling for an interview for my internship at an Ad firm which was situated at Lower Parel. I had prepared well for the interview and covered all the aspects from where questions could be asked.

When I entered the office I was feeling really nervous, yet somehow confident. I had a feeling that I would get the job.

The Receptionist asked me to wait for 10 minutes as Mr. Neeraj, the person who was supposed to take my Interview, was in a meeting. I was reading the ‘Afaqs’ magazine till the time he came. He asked me to come and wait in the Conference room for a couple of mins as he was on a call.

Now three/fourth of this conference room was filled with logos of all the clients the agency had, so one can guess how big this company was. When Mr. Neeraj came back in to the room, he started with the most obvious statement “So tell me something about you”. I started off by saying that I am currently in my Second year of BMS and that the field of Advertising as a whole fascinated me.

“What are your interests apart from studies?”

Uh, Sir, pretty much everything apart from studies.

We both laughed as if it was an informal interview. Then I said that I play cricket, football, and almost every racquet sport, and that I had a passion for writing. The questions then asked to me were on the technical side as to how advertising functioned in the sector as a whole and what was media planning in the sector. I had zero knowledge about media planning before the interview.

When the interview was over he said to me “when the next time we meet I want you to explain in a better way what media planning is”. I shook his hand and as I went out of the office I thought to myself, wait…what just happened? Did that mean I had the job? I had been asked to wait for the call and that he would let me know by Thursday.

Now the office was situated near the Palladium mall at Lower Parel, and I had almost no other chances to roam across Mumbai. After the interview, I went to the famous Siddhivinayak temple, not to pray or ask for something from god, just to be in a peaceful, contended state of mind.

After my visit to the temple, as I was coming back towards Dadar station to return home, I saw numerous pigeons flying and a host of them sitting in a huge tree. There was a shelter there and I found that people in the locality paid a guy to feed bird food to the pigeons. It was a really good sight to see the birds fly away and not being kept caged. All of a sudden, I felt a tap on my shoulder. It was a middle aged man asking me the time.

When I looked at my digital watch, it showed the time as 7:67 PM. I checked again to see if the watch was showing the actual time, it was. What the hell! The man let out a sigh and said “Hell.”

A chill ran down my spine; I felt the weather change; it felt as if time had stood still; the people had stopped moving, the pigeons had stopped flying, I felt as if it was a real life ‘limbo’ situation.

Before I could think of anything else there was this lingering question in my mind.